This invention relates to a system and method for facilitating interactive electronic communication through feedback.
In traditional interactive electronic discussion groups, also known as message boards and news groups, users post messages which can be then be read by others in the discussion group. Examples include the Usenet public bulletin board system of the Internet, and the Lotus Notes discussion group software for corporate users.
Discussion groups have been around for more than twenty-five years. Early electronic bulletin boards posted messages from one person on a topic of interest which could then be read by dozens of other people.
Graphical user interfaces have replaced most text-based interfaces, but the basic technology has remained the same. On one system, a person posts a message on a topic of interest, such as Bicycling, C++ programming, or movies. That system copies the message to hundreds of other systems, where anyone interested in that topic could see the message. A message consists of two parts: the headers and the body. The headers include information such as where the message came from, the name of the author, the electronic mail address for the author, the subject of the message, the name of the discussion group to whom the message was intended, and so on. The body of the message contains text, graphics, or binary information relating to the subject.
As the use of the Internet has grown, users of discussion groups have suffered from increasing spurious messages posted to the group which are irrelevant to the topic of discussion or which are undesirable for other reasons. For example, Usenet discussion groups, which can be read by hundreds of thousands of users, are increasingly filling with three types of messages considered noise by most users: commercial messages advertising a product or service which most members of the discussion group would prefer not be in the discussion group, inflammatory messages wherein a group of people engage in heated debate on a topic which is boring to most of the other users of that group, and repetitious questions which are answered in a periodically posted "FAQ" ("answers to Frequently Asked Questions").
Some specialized discussion groups use other mechanisms for computing the utility of proposed messages. For example, Lotus Notes uses sophisticated security techniques to ensure only authorized users can post messages to a particular group. Other discussion groups actually compute the utility of individual messages, but they base the computation of utility upon weighted averages of scaled ratings supplied by readers of the messages.
For example, at Stanford University during 1985-1986, the present inventor created a system which included weighted averages of scaled ratings and deployed it for the purposes of predicting users' valuations of messages, movies, and music they had not yet encountered.
Other examples are U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,870,579 (1987) and 4,996,642 (1989), wherein a system is described for predicting ratings based upon a weighted average of scaled ratings of users who had already seen a set of messages and based upon the similarity of the users' ratings of items which had been rated by both users.
Similarly, the GroupLens research project initially at MIT and then later at the University of Minnesota used weighted averages of scaled ratings to Usenet. The commercial Firefly system provides another example of a system which predicts ratings based upon matching people with similar interest.
Some of these endeavors focus on collaborative filtering, where readers rate articles on a scale of 1 to 10 indicating how good they are. Then, based upon those ratings, similar users are grouped together. If A rates a message and has similar taste to B, then B can draw upon A's ratings to decide whether or not to read the message.
However, there are problems with traditional systems which rate messages:
When users see their messages rated, for example, 2.3 on a scale of 1 to 10, they are forced to either lose respect for the opinions of the system, or to lose respect for their own writing. Not surprisingly, most users end up losing respect for the system. PA1 Traditional systems are all talk and no action; the system herein described facilitates the translation of ideas into commitments, and commitments into fulfilled commitments. PA1 Traditional systems don't distinguish between people who contribute to a community and those who do; this new system creates the possibility of people getting greater attention from others as a result of their contributions toward a shared end. PA1 Traditional systems that do include message ratings typically communicate a predicted rating of a message for an individual user, instead of the value of the message to the group as a whole. When the rating of a particular message is examined, it isn't obvious how many people have contributed to that rating. It could be five other people, or five thousand. Therefore, the predicted rating can be misleading to the group, and de-motivating to the author of a particular message. In addition, if one wishes to distribute awards to members of a discussion group based upon the value of their contributions, with such systems it isn't clear how to distribute said awards.
What is needed is a system and methodology that addresses and overcomes these problems.